What's New...

First of all I'd like to introduce everyone to Max Huber. Max has agreed to take upon himself the daunting task of administrating and maintaining the TFN Fishing Forums. He has a wealth of experience with other systems, including CompuServe, and brings a fresh passion to this part of the TFN Site. If you have any suggestions about the Forums, you can email Max at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Welcome Max! If you've been to TFN before, you will probably have noticed that we've just completed a major upgrade to the interface. After listening to what you, the users of the system want (yes, even though email replies can be slow sometimes, we do read everything that comes in), we have tried to make navigation on the system easier, upgrade the graphics, and increase the download speed.

This Issue...

With this issue, we've started to reduce the size of each upload by introducing a twice-per-month format whereby some articles will be uploaded around the beginning of the month and some around the middle. We've had comments from you, the users, that there is too much at one time to go through. This way, Subscribers will receive 2 Newsflashes per month, but the second one will be short.

Beef of the Month...

Recently, we in Toronto were put upon by various organized labour groups to bear a couple of "Days of Action". These Days were marked by many unionized workers taking the day off and protesting the policies of our current provincial government by attempting to disrupt (read shut-down) the city and impress upon the government that they had the power to get their way. Before you click your browser's 'Back' button, there is a fishing story here. Organized labour is the foundation of the political party we just kicked out of government for a variety of blunders, goofs and blatant unilaterally ill-begotten policies that put my beloved Ontario well on the way to not only financial, but also piscatorial ruin. One of these policies was to introduce a new "Outdoors Card", replacing the old fishing licenses. The price for a year's fishing was raised by 36% in one shot, and the government offered a 3-year license period instead of the old annual license.

Although the idea of reducing the budgetary item of license processing by about 25% was a good idea, these folks effectively realized about a 40% increase in net revenue on an annual basis. So what do you think happened to that tremendous surplus in conservation funds? It went into public housing, road construction (which was also cut), running an extremely excessive medical system, and so forth. To boot, they even reduced the conservation budget, resulting in a closure of fish stocking outfits, reduced lamprey control, and a ridiculous cut in the number of full-time Conservation Field Officers to 10 who had to cover the entire Province -- and pay for their own gas and vehicles!

Back to the Days of Action.

So now you know the types of government action the leaders of the unions who participated agree with. But what about the union membership? How many of them complain about the state of fishing? Well, a recent survey (not ours) cross referenced by current demographic profiling systems shows that over 60% of anglers in Ontario fit the blue-collar mold. Since 60% of the 8 million people in Ontario also go fishing at least once per year, that means that these policies negatively affected about 2.88 million anglers who in some form (often out of their control through mandatory pay-cheque deductions) supported the government that produced them.

What's wrong with this picture?

It seems clear to me that the oligarchic union leadership of Ontario, which can be considered an example of what exists throughout North America, run their own little world paid for by many of the people who disagree with, and are most negatively affected by their concepts of utopian reality. In a nutshell, and contrary to an old Star Trek saying that should be especially prevalent in a socialist organization, the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

By trying to shut down Toronto, which failed, the only Action that really took place was a psychological self-promotion of the union leaders of their authority and ability to coerce their membership into acting against their own best interests.

It's time for labour to be organized democratically, not autocratically, and for everyone to realize that in a democratic country, unions representing employed workers have every right to negotiate with employers on work-related matters, but should have NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to be an active political organization except where union work-related policies are concerned. If the majority of people want something, then they vote for it, keeping their own conscience and not being dictated to by someone holding the power of employment over them.

And for those of us anglers concerned about the future of our favourite pastime, make sure you belong to at least one active conservation club that carries some lobbying weight with your government. If it's numbers of people they want to see, I'm sure we can muster more folks than can a few piddly, egotistical, socialist union politicians who say one thing and do another.

Until next month...
(tight lines, get it wet, good fishin', see you on the water, etc., etc.).

Scott M. Binnie, Managing Editor